


they can't take this from us

by theappleppielifestyle



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, M/M, the avengers talk about having to kill each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-19
Updated: 2014-01-19
Packaged: 2018-01-09 06:46:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1142785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theappleppielifestyle/pseuds/theappleppielifestyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“We’re the only ones left.”</p>
<p>This is met with a silence that Tony hasn’t heard before in the arena. Not even when they were travelling towards it at two hundred miles an hour with trackers in their arms, not when they were waiting to be led out onto a stage and smile for the crowd, not when Tony was hiding and covering his mouth with both hands so the girl from District Two couldn’t hear his breath coming quickly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	they can't take this from us

**Author's Note:**

> In this AU, the tributes get six months to get to know each other before the Games begin so the drama can be more real. Also other various things have been changed.

The cannon goes off, a familiar hollow boom that should be comforting: one less person stopping them from getting out of here alive.

 Instead, it turns Tony’s spine to ice, because he’s run the numbers in his head a hundred times over during his eight days in the arena. For a moment it doesn’t fully register, hovering in the distant reaches of his mind, deliberate and unchanging no matter how many times he does the maths.

In front of him, Clint is breathing hard, his fingers white around his bow. Thor is holding him up as Clint half-sags into the ground, courtesy of blood loss from a Mutt bite yesterday. They all know just how long Clint is going to make it if they don’t get medical help soon.

Not that it matters now, Tony thinks numbly. To his right is Natasha, her face carefully blank as she obviously goes through the same numbers Tony has already completed. Then there’s Bruce, wary eyes on the treeline.

Standing on Tony’s left, a presence that is now more threatening than it has been for months, is Steve, his newly-large body solid beside Tony. Tony watches as Steve finally looks away from the body on the ground, the eighteen year old from District Three who put up such a good fight that Clint almost didn’t catch him with an arrow to the neck.

Since it’s Clint, though, the guy went down instantly. And now Clint has his bow drawn in the direction of the treeline, waiting for more tributes that Tony knows aren’t going to come.

A sharp exhalation from Natasha is what makes Tony finally tear his gaze away from Steve. He looks at her, and her lips are parted in the fear that Tony has only seen on her face twice: now, and when Bucky had started forward towards that Peacekeeper with hate in his eyes.

“Okay,” Steve says. He wipes some combination of dirt, blood and sweat from his forehead, or more accurately, smearing it down his cheek. “We head back into the woods in the opposite direction those guys came from. We head for the river-”

He breaks off, frowning, like the others, at Tony and Natasha. “Something wrong?”

Natasha’s lips are pinched and her eyes are glassy, and Tony knows she’s going to say it if Tony won’t, so he speaks first.

“We’re the only ones left.”

This is met with a silence that Tony hasn’t heard before in the arena. Not even when they were travelling towards it at two hundred miles an hour with trackers in their arms, not when they were waiting to be led out onto a stage and smile for the crowd, not when Tony was hiding and covering his mouth with both hands so the girl from District Two couldn’t hear his breath coming quickly.

Tony has never heard a silence like this, not in the arena and maybe not while he was younger and standing in the empty rooms of his house, seeing if he stood still enough, stood quiet enough for long enough, if he could actually vanish into the silence of the house.

He thinks he might prefer to be back there, if he had the choice. He’d take all the empty rooms in the world if he didn’t have to be looking at the expressions on the faces of these people who have worked their way into his heart without permission.

Finally, Steve says, “What?”

Tony nearly laughs. For all Steve’s speeches, all his anger and his determination and his stupid stubborn words in the face of people he shouldn’t be standing up to, and he can’t accept the maths Tony had perfected by age four.

“It’s just us,” Tony says. “That guy was the last one, apart from us. We’re the only tributes left.”

Steve, the bastard, locks his jaw. Like this is a bigwig from District Three that said something bad about an outlier District and Steve wanted to give the guy a piece of his mind. “How are you sure?”

“I counted.”

“We’ve all been counting, but we’ve been malnourished and exhausted and injured and _running for our lives_ , you couldn’t have kept track-”

“He’s right,” Natasha cuts Steve off, meeting his eyes steadily like only Natasha can. “Steve. We’re the last ones.”

It’s sinking in, Tony can see it. The resignation, the quiet anger, the clenching fists. The silence that keeps threatening to close in on all of them.

Since it could very well be the last thing Tony sees, he watches as Steve accepts it. Watches his mouth move wordlessly, trying to find something right to say, before finally steeling his eyes. “New plan,” he says, just as firm as before. “We head into the woods and split up.”

Softly, Bruce says, “Cap,” but Steve talks over him.

“We split up, we try to stay alive as long as we can. They’ll send in whatever they can get, Mutts, mudslides, you name it, and if you hear someone yell, goddamnit, you go and help them before getting the hell out of there. They can’t make us-”

“Steve,” Tony tries, but all Steve does is turn to him with newly broad shoulders and two new inches on him, and god, Tony wishes he didn’t get the serum less than a day before they had to go to the arena, he could see himself falling in love with Steve’s body all over again. There have already been too many moments before Tony had fallen asleep beneath a tent, when he felt safe enough with Steve next to him that he let himself imagine mapping out Steve’s new body with his hands like he had done with his old one.

But then Tony had remembered bitterly that there’s only one of them coming out of this, and he shouldn’t get distracted with something that’s never going to happen.

Steve turns to Tony, all righteous anger that won’t help them at all, and grits out, “I’m not, Tony, I won’t let them make us- make us-”

“Kill each other,” Thor finishes gravely. His mouth keeps twitching, tugging downwards in a way that Tony has seen a lot since they lost Loki over a cliff five days ago.

“We don’t exactly have another option,” Bruce says. His fingers tug, tug, tug at his sleeves, pulling at the cuffs and worrying them between his fingertips. “I mean, I don’t- I don’t want, I’d never-”

“We know,” Natasha tells him. “I- we wouldn’t, either. But.”

A week ago, Tony had watched from the trees as Natasha drew a bow at Clint. Watched as Clint  continued gathering firewood for thirty seconds as Natasha stood there in a perfect stance, arrow stuck in place. Watched as Clint turned, watched as realization flickered in his eyes.

Tony had watched as Clint slowly bent down, let the firewood roll from his arms, and held his hands up. _It’s okay,_ he had told Natasha. _It’s fine. Seriously. Only one of us is getting out of this. It’s okay, Nat._

Tony had watched with a tight grip on the branches, going through the statistics of how many bones he’d break if he jumped on Natasha right now, and he had watched as Natasha stood, unmoving, for another few seconds before letting her weapon hang down. _You’re a better archer, anyway,_ she had tossed at Clint, and then: _Pick up the firewood, dumbass. It’s wet down there._

Later that night, when Tony passed Natasha on his way to stand watch, he leaned in and murmured, _softie_.

Natasha hadn’t missed a beat in calling him a hypocrite.

Tony remembers the way her hands had trembled for a few minutes after putting the bow down. They aren’t doing that now, but when he inspects them closer, it looks like she’s holding down on a tremor.

Clint sighs loudly, loud enough so everyone looks at him.

“Well, fuck, fine.” He bends, using the arm that isn’t around Thor’s shoulders to tug off the bandage that wraps around his knee. Instantly, blood starts running quicker down his leg, and Thor nearly drops him in haste of pulling the bandage back into place.

Clint looks at him, affronted. “Dude, bad touch.”

“Do not,” Thor snaps, but Clint just waves his bloody hand.

“All but one of us is going to kick it, buddy. I’m just saying I’d rather, y’know, bleed out than have one of you hit me over the head or die in some Capitol-induced landslide. Or Mutts. Yeesh. I hope I never have to see one of those again. And hey, maybe I won’t, if you guys would let me die painlessly.” He finishes with a glare at Thor, who glares straight back.

“I’d rather die now than later,” Bruce says slowly, cautiously. “Um. Nat, you know how to make it not hurt, right?”

Natasha takes a few seconds to answer. “I know how to make it quick,” she offers, her hand stiff and still around the knife that has taken the lives of three tributes and counting.

“No,” Steve says, when he sees the looks on their faces. “Guys. _No_. We’re not-”

“I don’t want to prolong the inevitable,” Clint snaps at him. His damaged leg is still bleeding badly- Tony dimly calculates how many hours he has left. If hours. “And I’ll- if you guys want me to, I can. If you want. I’m a good shot. I’ll make it quick, like Nat said.”

“We are _not_ ,” Steve says, half-snarls it, and for a second Tony thinks he’s going to shove Tony’s hand off when Tony moves it to Steve’s shoulder. Instead he stops, jaw tense, before looking over at Tony.

_At least I get to spend the rest of my life with you_ , Tony thinks, and knows that he’s never going to say it. “Steve. I’d prefer it if it was here, with all of you, than out in the woods under some Mutt.”

“Tony-”

“Steve. Please.”

Steve stares at him, every bit the man he was when Tony first met him six month ago, just a few inches taller and with more meat on his bones. Finally, his shoulders- big, bigger than Tony’s ever getting used to, and is never going to touch skin to skin- sag. “Fine. But we have to decide who’s walking out of here.”

Again, silence, but this time it’s heavier. Steve looks from face to face, only a few of them meeting his eyes. “Guys?”

“We kind of already decided,” Clint says after a moment.

“We didn’t think anything like this would actually happen,” Natasha continues. “I thought we’d get picked off. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

“Like _what_?”

Four gazes turn to Tony, and then a fifth from Steve with mounting disbelief.

“Before you start with another one of your speeches,” Tony says before Steve can start on a speech, “Can I just make this short and say that this totally wasn’t supposed to happen and I expected everyone to die before this?”

“Tony,” Steve says, and yep, there’s the shoulders coming up again. “What did you decide with the group? Apart from me, apparently.”

Tony decides that he might as well look into Steve’s eyes as much as he can, even if they’re currently seething with anger directed at Tony. “It makes sense.”

“How does it-”

“You have your mom,” Tony tries.

“You have both your parents!” Steve spins, waving a hand at Natasha, Bruce and Thor. “Most of you have parents!”

“Parents that will _miss_ you,” Tony says. “Sarah needs you, Steve.”

“She’s got Bucky to get her food,” Steve says, and then jerks his gaze towards Natasha. “You, you have Bucky, too.”

“He’ll understand. We discussed it.”

“You discussed it,” Steve repeats in a low tone. “You guys- all of you, you’ve actually sat down and talked about sacrificing yourselves to let me go home?”

“We didn’t sit down,” Tony shrugs. “It was sort of a passing thing. Some comments about how if anyone deserved to win this, it’s you.”

“You don’t get to choose.”

“Maybe.” Tony smiles wryly. “Steve, there’s two ways this could go. Either we figure out who gets to off who, or we knock you out and then do it before you wake up.”

“Jesus Christ,” Steve says, and it’s muffled, since he’s rubbing his hands down his face. He slides his hands over his eyes, scrubs his palms into them. “Fucking _Christ_. God.”

“I know, right,” Tony says, trying for a joke that his heart isn’t in. “Fuck whoever decided the tributes should room together for six months before the Games. All sorts of feeling shit happens.”

Steve still has his head in his hands, so Tony keeps talking. “Hey, at least this Games will get a lot of traction, no-one’s ever done this sort of thing before. They’ll be playing this for a few years, at least. And, uh. Tell Pep and Rhodey I’m sorry, okay? I tried to say something to that extent before I got in the plane, but Pepper started yelling over me and Rhodey just called me a moron and hit me on the shoulder.”

“What if there is no winner?”

Tony stops. “What?”

“What if no-one wins the Hunger Games,” Steve says, and his hands come down from his face.

“It’s never happened,” Thor says.

“Gotta be a winner,” Clint says from where he’s been continually sagging closer and closer to the ground, Thor continuing to pull him up when he does. “Someone’s gotta get something out of this.”

Steve’s face is eerily calm. “Who says?”

“The Capitol,” Natasha says slowly, like he’s an idiot. “They won’t let there not be a winner.”

“What if we take away their choices like they took ours,” Steve says, and his hand goes into his pocket. He pulls out a brown bag, and it sparks in Tony’s brain like a firework going off.

Steve looks at them all one by one, watching the realization go hand in hand with the berries Steve is holding.

Clint’s breath rattles. “Okay. Okay, lets- yeah. Much better idea than mine. Less bludgeoning and trauma.”

“Okay,” Steve says, giving the group another once-over. “Guys? Okay?”

Natasha’s the first to hold out her hand, and then the others hold theirs out. Steve pours several berries into their palms, and when he gets to Tony, he empties out the last three into Tony’s palm. They stain Tony’s skin blue, mingling with other various substances that Tony doesn’t want to identify.

The berries are small, weirdly tiny in Steve’s hand, and Tony watches them leave blue tracks on his palm before blurting, “Wait.”

Steve looks at him, and Tony doesn’t let him respond before he’s leaning up- leaning up, that’s weird for this- and kissing Steve, using his free hand to cradle a jaw he never got a chance to learn. Steve’s mouth is as giving as it ever is under Tony’s lips, pressing back with tender familiarity.

Tony feels a hand carding through his hair, impossibly big and impossibly gentle, and has to stop, jerking back before he whimpers into Steve’s mouth. “Okay. Yeah. Okay,” he says, and kisses Steve again, once, lingering for a moment before leaning back.

It doesn’t matter that they’ve just exposed themselves to millions of people. It doesn’t matter, because Steve is counting to three and Tony’s stupid, brilliant makeshift family are all raising poison berries to their lips.

It never touches them, because just before they come into contact with skin a voice echoes out over the arena:

“STOP!”

And they do. They stop, hands frozen halfway to their mouths, all staring at each other.

“Stop,” the voice continues, strangely breathless. “Uh- ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for the six winners of the 74th Hunger Games!”

Through a haze, Tony hears Natasha mutter something undoubtedly filthy in Russian. Then berries are bouncing from their hands, staining the grass instead, and Thor all but carries Clint to the river with everyone.

Tony scrubs his hands clean in the water, even getting under his fingernails- he doesn’t get all the dried blood off, but he gets most of the dirt and all of the berry juice, and then he’s trying to stand but his knees give out under him.

“Shit,” he hears himself say. “Hooooly shit.”

He kisses Steve again for the hell of it, and their wet hands get everywhere.

Then he stays there, with Steve’s shaking arms around him and Bruce’s disbelieving laughter as he digs a hand though his hair. Thor has both his feet in the water, Clint is lying on his back and Natasha is lying next to him, hair matted with blood and crusting to her shirt.

Together, they wait for the plane.


End file.
